Site Mobile Navigation

Skateboarding Rolls Out of the Suburbs

CHAIRMEN OF THE BOARD Street surfers at the Brooklyn Museum. Below, Pharrell Williams tricks gravity.Credit
Robert Wright for The New York Times

IT was late afternoon when the young skaters gathered in front of the Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway. Weaving among the commuters who trudged from a nearby subway station, the skaters hurdled steps, slid along curbs and kick-flipped their boards into the air. With a few exceptions, their performances fell somewhere between outright beginner and advanced novice. But it wasn’t their ability or the lack of it that made this group notable, it was the composition: most of the skaters were black.

Long an activity favored by white kids, skateboarding has surged into mainstream culture on a wave of multimedia appeal. The ESPN X Games are in their 13th season, 3 current shows on MTV feature professional skaters, and sales from the Tony Hawk video game series on Activision have totaled over a billion dollars.

And by infiltrating hip-hop music and urban fashion, the sport has found new popularity among a black demographic that traditionally regarded skating with apprehension, if not scorn.

“I think a lot of the stigma changed from it being a predominantly white thing, to being for everybody,” said Sheldon Thompson, 20, of Flatbush, one of the more experienced skateboarders at the museum. He now offers instruction to fledgling skaters in his predominantly Caribbean neighborhood. “They started skating this year, and they can already do some stuff that’s hard for me,” he said.

In New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities, skateboarding has joined the fraternity of minority street games. “You had basketball, you had strikeouts, you had street football which you played manhole-to-manhole,” said Bahr Brown, who opened Harlem’s first skate shop, Everything Must Go, in October last year. “Now a kid comes in my shop and he’s like, ‘Yo, Mom, can I get a skateboard?’”

From the “street surfers” of the 1960s to the shaggy-haired Southern Californians who sailed up empty swimming pools in the 1970s, the earliest skaters were usually white kids. During a surge of popularity in late 1980s, the sport was celebrated for possessing a rebellious punk-rock edge (even as the skaters’ flannel shirts and bandannas had origins in Latino style).

In black neighborhoods, skateboarding was regarded as something foreign that crept in from the suburbs. “Black people would look at me like I was the brother who fell from another planet,” said Steven Snyder, 45, a former professional skateboarder and a manager at Uprise Skateboard Shop in Chicago. He compares the social stigma of skating within the black community to that of “making out with a white woman in the 1950s down South.”

Over the last two decades, the sport shifted away from ramp-based vert skating to street skating, a variation that made use of urban structures like stairways, curbs and railings. As the importance of access to ramps dwindled, skateboarding’s fan base grew increasingly diverse.

From the mid-1980s onward, black street skaters such as Ray Barbee, Kareem Campbell and Harold Hunter (who died last year) became prominent. In 2004, Reebok started sponsoring Stevie Williams, a gold-toothed, bling-flashing skater from Philadelphia. Mr. Williams, now 27, has his own line of Reebok gear, DGK by RBK (DGK is an acronym for Dirty Ghetto Kids), and is regarded as a successor to Allen Iverson and Jay-Z as a pitchman with street appeal.

“I realized I wasn’t really on their level,” Mr. Williams said in an interview, “but I can get to there with a lot of hard work and people supporting me. At the end of the day, I’m young — I’m not as old as those dudes and I probably don’t have as much business experience. I just need to work hard to achieve that.”

Photo

Credit
Lawrence Lucier/FilmMagic

The importance of skateboarding in urban communities has not gone unnoticed by some of the sport’s most successful figures. Tony Hawk, the veteran skateboarder who oversees an empire of video games, equipment and extreme-sport tours, heads Stand Up for Skateparks, which has raised funds for the construction of over 300 skate parks in low-income areas. “Every community says they get used more than any other sporting facility they have — any basketball court, any tennis court, any baseball field,” Mr. Hawk said.

As the stigma against skateboarding in the black community has dissipated, hip-hop artists have become some of the sport’s most influential advocates. Instead of being called a “white boy,” black skaters are now compared to rap artists. “If you hang around your African-American friends that don’t skate, you’re going to get the nickname ‘Skateboard P’,” said Iusu Beckle, 18, another Brooklyn native who skates at the museum.

The original “Skateboard P” is Pharrell Williams, the rapper and producer. In the 2002 video for “Rock Star,” a song by his group N.E.R.D., Mr. Williams wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a logo from Shorty’s, a Santa Barbara, Calif., skate shop, and performed atop a ramp as skaters careered past him. “I was rapping and it was getting me nowhere, so I went back to my roots,” he said in a telephone interview explaining his decision to intertwine his music with an adolescent hobby.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The widely played video helped solidify the bonds between the hip-hop and skateboarding scenes, and Mr. Williams subsequently founded a professional skate team, and even constructed a small ramp in his backyard in Virginia.

“When I’m with rappers in the studio, they say, ‘I used to skate, too,’” Mr. Williams said. “I can only just say I was one of the ones that was willing to speak up about it.”

Other hip-hop performers have since become more willing to express their solidarity with the skating community. In 2006, Lupe Fiasco released his debut single “Kick, Push,” a song whose title is lingo for the footwork used to propel a skateboard.

“I got dissed for it because they said I wasn’t a real skater,” he said. But he also drew praise for the song title, he said, “because the people thought I didn’t have to be a real skater. I’m just telling that story and appreciating it.”

Overlap between hip-hop and skateboarding fashion is also increasingly common. Just as Run-DMC lauded Adidas and Nelly praised the Nike Air Force 1, the Berkeley-based quartet the Pack gave Vans a new legitimacy when they named a 2006 song after the venerable sneaker brand. “I’m walking through some of the grimiest parts of Oakland and I’m seeing kids on skateboards, that’s something you would never see before ‘Vans’ came out,” said Keith (Stunna) Jenkins, 19, a rapper from the Pack. “I used to wear Vans and people used to tell me I looked like Mr. Miyagi with those karate shoes.”

UNSURPRISINGLY, some first-time skaters drawn into the sport by catchy choruses or candy-colored sneakers are dismissed as poseurs. “You’ll see kids that are dressed up like Mars Blackman, wearing Cazals and a cycling cap and tight denim, and they’re walking around with a skateboard as an accessory, holding it in a way we call ‘the mall grab,’” said Jefferson Pang, a former professional skater and the East Coast brand manager for DC Skateboarding.

Yet for those new recruits who can endure the taunts (not to mention the scrapes, bruises and countless moments of looking foolish that skateboarding inevitably demands), the allure of trendiness can be a gateway to deeper appreciation.

Wesley Cordero, a 16-year-old from Manhattan, was sitting on the amphitheater-style steps in front of the Brooklyn Museum, wearing a DC Skateboarding shirt, wallet chain and skinny-legged jeans, with his skateboard leaning next to him. When three black kids wearing crisply pressed school clothes politely asked to borrow his board, he agreed, watching from his perch as they unsuccessfully attempted a few tricks and strolled off into the October dusk.

“Some kids just do it because it’s a trend and they want to fit in,” Mr. Cordero said. He, of course, has been skating for several months.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 98 of the New York edition with the headline: Skateboarding Rolls Out of the Suburbs. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe